Geoff's Blog

You know, the more I read of Christopher Hitchens, the less respect I have for him. These are his dribblings about the Glenn Beck rally over the weekend:

One crucial element of the American subconscious is about to become salient and explicit and highly volatile. It is the realization that white America is within thinkable distance of a moment when it will no longer be the majority….

Until recently, the tendency has been to think of this rather than to speak of it—or to speak of it very delicately, lest the hard-won ideal of diversity be imperiled.

Actually, it’s “lest one be called a racist.” It has piss-all to do with imperiling the “hard-won ideal of diversity,” which is in no danger at all of being imperiled.

Thus, it is really quite rare to hear slurs against President Barack Obama that are based purely on the color of his skin. Even Beck himself has tried to back away from the smears of that kind that he has spread in the past.

Beck called Obama a “racist”—that’s the “smear” he’s been backing away from recently. I still think he was right the first time, and that just as literally 70% of blacks are actively homophobic (in California, at least, and probably with a just as high or higher percentage in more conservative states), well over 80% of them are incurable and unapologetic racists. (By that I mean, they are people for whom their race is the most important aspect of their self-identification, which automatically makes them racists, just as feminists’ overweening identification as women can lead nowhere else but to them being unapologetic sexists, who favor and see only the good in their preferred in-group, and only the bad in the mistrusted out-group.) Including the half-black, racist Obama.

[I]t is increasingly common to hear allegations that Obama is either foreign-born or a Muslim.

The foreign-born thing is something that Barack could clear up in an instant, if he wanted to. That he hasn’t cleared up the “birther” issues shows either that he can’t (i.e., that the birthers are right), or that he doesn’t want to, i.e., he’s using it as a way of letting the “wingnuts” embarrass themselves. Either way, it’s completely his own fault, and his own responsibility; so there’s no point in trying to pin that on the people who are asking reasonable questions (even if their imaginations are getting away from them, beyond that).

And no, Obama’s not a Muslim. But he did sit in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s church for several decades. And Wright is actively sympathetic with Louis Farrakhan’s truly vile and unapologetically racist Black Muslim movement in America:

Wright … called Louis Farrakhan “one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century,” and repeated his endorsement of an AIDS conspiracy theory [i.e., that AIDS is a biological weapon manufactured by whites to wipe out the black race]. (Wikipedia, since removed)

Obama’s spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a good friend of Louis Farrakhan and even accompanied him to Libya to meet with General Muammar Gaddaffi in 1984. And in 1995, Barack Obama himself flew from Chicago to Washington, D.C. to attend Farrakhan’s [sexist] Million Man March….

No one could sit in a church like that for twenty years without being a racist: Anyone who wasn’t a racist would have been so disgusted by Wright’s (and Farrakhan’s) racism and sexism, that he would have simply walked out and not gone back.

This is how I summarized that craziness it in Hip Like Me:

[Jesse] Jackson is also a “friend and ally” of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. That Nation teaches that black people were the original humans, and that whites are only “potential humans.” Plus some even more out-of-this-world ideas, from a Meet the Press interview with Farrakhan in 1997:

[Tim Russert:] Henry Louis Gates … asked you whether you still subscribe to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad on Yakub, a black scientist who 6,600 years ago created the white man, and that by the end of the twentieth century, a spaceship will come and rain down upon white people and people who don’t embrace Islam. Do you subscribe to the teachings of Yakub, that Yakub, the black scientist, created the white man?

[Farrakhan:] I subscribe to every word that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us.

Until Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam in 1964, knowing his life was in danger for doing that—he was assassinated in 1965—he promoted the same science-fiction teachings. And more:

White people are born devils by nature….

Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to black people…. Anyone who has studied the genetic phase of biology knows that white is considered recessive and black is considered dominant. When you want strong coffee, you ask for black coffee….

Elsewhere, Farrakhan labeled the Jews, Palestinian Arabs, Koreans and Vietnamese as “bloodsuckers,” for allegedly taking from the black community but giving nothing back in return.

Farrakhan later confirmed that he is neither a racist nor anti-Semitic.

Enlarging on that same theme in a speech in 1994, the Supreme Minister of the Nation of Islam claimed: “Murder and lying comes easy for white people.”

Enlarging even further on that theme, in 1992 filmmaker Spike Lee stated:

A lot of people will have to do a lot of explaining on AIDS one day. All of a sudden, a disease appears out of nowhere that nobody has a cure for, and it’s specifically targeted at gays and minorities (i.e., Hispanics and blacks). The mystery disease, yeah, about as mysterious as genocide.

I’m convinced AIDS is a government-engineered disease. They got one thing wrong, they never realized it couldn’t just be contained to the groups it was intended to wipe out.

A year earlier, comedian Bill Cosby had reportedly claimed that the same illness was “started by human beings to get after certain people they don’t like”…. And, in the July 1999 issue of Vanity Fair, Will Smith floated the idea that “possibly AIDS was created as a result of biological-warfare testing.”

Do you honestly think that that crazy-paranoid-racist ideology won’t have come up regularly in Wright’s “Christian” church? Of course it did. And Obama sat through it all, when any thinking person with a conscience would have walked out in disgust.

Hitchens:

And these insinuations are perfectly emblematic of the two main fears of the old majority: that it will be submerged by an influx from beyond the borders and that it will be challenged in its traditional ways and faiths by an alien and largely Third World religion.

Wasn’t that a big part of the motivation behind multiculturalism in the first place? You know, to break the monopoly of white (male) Christian power in the West by importing a bunch of non-white, non-Christian Others, with the idea that “You scratch my back [in agitating for civil/women's rights], and I’ll scratch yours,” against the common (white, Christian male) enemy. (And as we all know, “the enemy of my white, male enemy is my friend.” Isn’t he? Ask the gays in California.) Plus, blank-slate ideology (where equality of opportunities would automatically produce equality of results, so an inequality in the latter is taken as proof of discrimination in the former) and a genuine wish to make up for the wrongs of colonialism (which wish can be driven just as well by the greater liberal desire for fairness, as by the one-dimensional accusation of “white liberal guilt”).

At the last “Tea Party” rally I attended, earlier this year at the Washington Monument, some in the crowd made at least an attempt to look fierce and minatory. I stood behind signs that read: “We left our guns at home—this time” and “We invoke the First Amendment today—the Second Amendment tomorrow.” But Beck’s event was tepid by comparison: a call to sink to the knees rather than rise from them.

The alternative was to get dismissed by the liberal media (yourself included, Hitch) as a bunch of resentful, gun-totin’ rednecks.

[T]he U.S. population is simply not going to be replenished by Puritan pilgrims from England, and the original Pledge of Allegiance was fine with most people as a statement of national unity, until its “original intent” was compromised by a late insertion of the words “under God” in the McCarthyite 1950s.

Only atheists are bothered by that insertion, and they comprise less than 15% of the population. When illegal immigrants from Mexico, and legal immigrants (including Muslims) from the rest of the Third World, gag on that same pledge of allegiance, it ain’t the “under God” part that they’re being bothered by. Hitchens’ treatment of that issue is either pathetically ignorant or outright disingenuous/dishonest.

In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one. What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated?

Oh, I dunno, maybe the “War on Christmas,” for one—e.g., the fact that you’re not even allowed to cheerfully say “Merry Christmas” without risking offending the recipient?

A controversy regarding these issues arose in 2002, when the New York City public school system banned the display of nativity scenes, but allowed the display of supposedly less overtly religious symbols such as Christmas trees, Hanukkah menorahs, and the Muslim star and crescent….

In December 2007, a public controversy arose when a public school in Ottawa, Canada planned to have the children in its primary choir sing a version of the song “Silver Bells” with the word “Christmas” removed….

Another controversy occurred in 2005 with the US hardware retailer Lowe’s. Signage for their Christmas trees read “holiday trees” in English, but read árboles de Navidad (Christmas trees) in Spanish rather than árboles de feriados. In 2007, Lowe’s started using the term “family tree,” sparking protest from the American Family Association, but they have since claimed that this term was only a printing mistake….

In 2009 in Jerusalem, Israel the Lobby for Jewish Values with support of the Jerusalem Rabbinate has handed out fliers condemning Christmas and have called for a boycott of restaurants and hotels that sell or put up Christmas trees and what the organization called “foolish” Christian symbols.

Christians have been successful in getting major retailers to go back to saying “Christmas,” but that’s only because they still have the numbers to enforce meaningful boycotts. That won’t be the case forever.

And no one, I’m sure, has ever claimed that “Christianity is an endangered religion”—that’s a pure straw man on Hitchens’ addled (or dishonest) part, equating potential minority (< 50%) status with being “endangered,” i.e., at risk of not existing at all.

Further, any Christian, regardless of how moderate he is, would surely say that “the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated”—that’s just part of wanting the whole world to hear and believe the Good News you’ve accepted into your heart! So yeah, I’m sure they’re regularly guilty of thinking that Jesus is underappreciated! How could they not be??

What an idiot. What a fucking dishonest atheist idiot. I’d like to be charitable and say that it’s just the chemotherapy that’s affecting his ability to think clearly, but I really doubt that that’s the problem.

Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned?

What does “waking up” first thing in the morning have to do with it? Probably even less than McCarthyism had to do with the addition of the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. That is, it’s just an easy way for Hitchens to smear things by association, in this case painting the Tea Partiers and their ilk as being sleepy-eyed dopes.

And who has ever said “no appreciation”? What the relevant people (including Palin) are obviously saying (going back to the way in which veterans returning from Vietnam were “welcomed” back home in the ’60s) is “insufficient appreciation.” So again, either stupid or dishonest on Hitchens’ part, take your pick.

It’s not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.

What a polite and circuitous way of calling the people involved, racists—whose perception of being treated unfairly by (and in favor of) affirmative-action benefiting minorities is purely imagined, and whose racism is shown by the very “clue” of them denying it (in the naïve hope that doing so will make a difference to dishonest and/or incompetent journalists like Hitchens himself).

Damned if ya do, and damned if ya don’t, eh?

Incidentally, of all the things to cite in opposition of the Ground Zero mosque, the relevant imam’s statement (which Hitchens makes much of) that “the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened” is not one of them. As the Canadian military tells its own soldiers (I have this from one of them, who was deployed to the Persian Gulf), Osama bin Laden was originally financed by the American government, as a (Cold War) terrorist against Russia. So in a most direct way, Bin Laden was indeed created by American foreign policy. And even if it wasn’t for that, there’s still plenty of political (i.e., American foreign-policy) motivation behind Islamic terrorism.

These are Bin Laden’s own words, unmodulated by Hitchens’ wonky/dishonest view of the world:

Allah knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed—when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way (and) to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.

So in no way is it a 100% cultural (or virgin-Paradise driven) war, as Hitchens and Sam Harris disingenuously try their best to reduce it to.

Late professors Arthur Schlesinger and Samuel Huntington both published books expressing misgivings about, respectively, multiculturalism and rapid demographic change. But these were phrased so carefully as almost to avoid starting the argument they flirted with.

Yes, because they didn’t want to have their careers ruined by being called “racists” by the liberal media. See under “Tea Party, clue.” How friggin’ difficult is that to understand?

More recently, almost every European country has seen the emergence of populist parties that call upon nativism and give vent to the idea that the majority population now feels itself unwelcome in its own country.

I know I do. Seriously. And that’s an attitude that I’ve only come to reluctantly over the past three years, as economic circumstances forced me to live alongside these imported (and homegrown) dregs, who would regularly (i.e., every couple of weeks, on average) hassle me as I was walking down the street, minding my own business, for no reason other than the color of my skin, and their own homophobia (even though I’m not gay, but I do look like I very well might be, and regardless, what little low-IQ runt wouldn’t be thrilled to find someone that even he can finally push around?).

The ugliness of Islamic fundamentalism in particular has given energy and direction to such movements. It will be astonishing if the United States is not faced, in the very near future, with a similar phenomenon.

Let’s hope so. Let’s fucking hope so.

Another controversy occurred in 2005 with the US hardware retailer Lowe’s. Signage for their Christmas trees read “holiday trees” in English, but read árboles de Navidad (Christmas trees) in Spanish rather than árboles de feriados. In 2007, Lowe’s started using the term “family tree”, sparking protest from the American Family Association, but they have since claimed that this term was only a printing mistake.^[34]

After claims that it was avoiding the term, US retailer Lowe’s began using “Christmas tree” prominently in advertising.

In 2009 in Jerusalem, Israel the Lobby for Jewish Values with support of the Jerusalem Rabbinate has handed out fliers condemning Christmas and have called for a boycott of restaurants and hotels that sell or put up Christmas trees and what the organization called “foolish” Christian symbols.

One other thing, about Hitchens’ idea that the “don’t walk your dogs near a mosque” vs. “don’t build the mosque near Ground Zero” debate can be a lesson in mutual tolerance: We have no leverage at all in those negotiations because (i) we’re dealing with a bullying culture in which attempts at negotiation are seen as a sign of weakness, (ii) they already know that when they threaten us we won’t threaten them back (which is another sign of weakness to them, as bullies, right?), (iii) they’ve got God/Allah on their side, so letting dogs walk too close to their mosques or moving the Ground Zero mosque would both be effectively “giving in to Satan,” and (iv) if all else fails, they can scream “racism” or “Islamophobia,” to get us to cave.

So if they threaten us for walking our dogs too close to their “holy” places, we’ll just find some other, safer place to walk … until there are no such places left.

Given all of those constraints, the only way to “fight back” against the Islamic menace is to make them feel unwelcome in our countries, via opinion poles and private election votes, passive-aggressive though that may be. And because that fight is so unfair, and we are so culturally self-restricted in how we can respond even to savages who threaten our basic human rights from within our own countries, things like banning minarets in Switzerland, banning burquas in France, and protesting against any mosque in NYC (regardless of where it’s built), are not only encouraging signs that the populace is waking up to that menace, but are the right thing to do … especially if they make Muslims feel unwelcome in the West.

Smear ‘em all with lard, is what I say.